Italo Calvino citations

“Écouter quelqu’un qui lit à haute voix, ce n’est pas la même chose que lire en silence. Quand tu lis, tu peux t’arrêter, ou survoler les phrases : c’est toi qui décides du rythme. Quand c’est un autre qui lit, il est difficile de faire coïncider ton attention avec le tempo de sa lecture : sa voix va ou trop vite ou trop lentement.”

“Sous les murs rouges de Paris, s’était déployée l’armée de France : Charlemagne devait passer les paladins en revue. Ils attendaient depuis trois grandes heures, dans la touffeur d’un après-midi de début d’été, un peu couvert, nuageux; on mitonnait dans les cuirasses, comme dans des marmites mises à cuire à feu doux. Peut-être bien que, dans cet alignement imperturbable de chevaliers, quelqu’un déjà s’était évanoui, ou simplement assoupi : de toute façon, l’armure les maintenait bien cambrés sur leur selle, tous pareils.”

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

“There is no language without deceit.”

“And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, […] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; […] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, […] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.”

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”

“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

“One reads alone, even in another's presence.”

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?”

“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”

“Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”

“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”

“The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.”

“I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.”

“Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

“They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”

“Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

“I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.”

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

“…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”

“The novels that attract me most… are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”

“It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

“Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.”